14 May 2014 - joy beyond ourselves

14 May 2014 - joy beyond ourselves

My paraphrase of today's gospel: I have told you to lay down your life for your friends, which is what it means to keep my commandments, so that my joy might be in you and your joy might be complete.  This is the joy of being my friends, the joy of knowing everything that the master is doing, the joy of knowing everything I've heard from my Father.  From this vantage point, the Father will give you whatever you ask.

“I have told you this so that my joy might be in you
and your joy might be complete.

We want complete joy.  What is the 'this' here? 

If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love,
just as I have kept my Father’s commandments
and remain in his love.

He tells us to keep his commandments not to impose limits on us but so that we might have joy.  When we obey the commandments we keep our hearts open to the love he wants to pour out on us.  He distills down the commandments to one commandment: "love one another as I love you."  He tells us to lay down our lives for our friends just as he does.  We know that we aren't quite where we ought to be yet because to lay down our lives does not sound to us like joy.  Why does Jesus insist on this as a condition his friendship?  Can't he just give us joy while we continue to live egocentric lives?  He cannot.  The deepest truth of who we are, made in his image, can only find fulfillment in self-gift.  Vatican II tells us:

Man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for himself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of self. (GS 24)

This is what it means to know what our master is doing, everything Jesus has heard from his Father.  It is a revelation about the structure of reality, about the purpose of God which underlies everything he does.  The Father pours out all he is so completely that this is the Son himself.  The Son reciprocates that love.  The bond of self-giving between them is the Holy Spirit.  None of the Blessed Trinity holds on to his own life.  Their limitless joy is only in the context of constantly pouring out their own superabundant lives in love. God wants to let us in on this wonderful exchange.  This is impossible on a human level.  We can't get beyond ourselves to genuinely enter in to love like this. It is rather the lofty destiny of sharing in the divine nature.  He wants our joy to be complete in nothing less than sharing in his own life.  And in the human context of life on earth this means to lay down our lives for God and for our brothers. This is far from being an arbitrary limitation.  It is a summons to move beyond all we can ask for or imagine into the uncharted territory of blessedness that is life in God.

It wasn't us who chose him.  It was he who chose us because he knows so much better than us what makes for human flourishing and happiness.  To that end, we should consult with him whenever we can when we have to make choices.  This is what the apostles do in the reading from Acts.

You, Lord, who know the hearts of all,
show which one of these two you have chosen
to take the place in this apostolic ministry
from which Judas turned away to go to his own place.”

Since we are working on a plan which predates us, which is ultimately more than we can even understand, with ends greater than we can imagine, we must leave the plan in God's hands.  We must not try to take it and run with it on our own apart from him.  This is how we can "bear fruit that will remain".  

So let us keep his commandments.  Let us be ready to lay down our lives for his kingdom.  When we do so we experience the joy of knowing what the master is doing, of seeing the kingdom built.  We see the lowly lifted up all around us, seated now with princes.  St. Matthias is lifted up like this.  But even those who aren't made bishops are lifted up because we are all called to the same thing: the fullness of joy.

He raises up the lowly from the dust;
from the dunghill he lifts up the poor
To seat them with princes,
with the princes of his own people.